The Metropolitan Police's crack team of highly trained experts in tongue in cheek humour and satire are overstretched due to the high level of potential terror threats posted on social networking sites over the last few weeks.

'It takes years of experience to differentiate between someone having a bit of a giggle, and a full scale threat to national security,' Commented Chief Superintendent Richard Simpson, Head of Sarcasm Detection, 'most members of the force have no sense of irony at all so it takes a very special individual make these distinctions. The sheer volume of tweets has inevitably meant that we may have been unable to pursue the those with more sinister intentions, such as Dara O'Briain.'

The Twitter phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by Al Quaeda who are feared to be using the confusion to organise their movements. Twitter itself has informed the Unit of increasing activity of a member named only as Osamarama whose latest post reads 'Death to all infidels LOL :-D, see you all at my cave 6pm for some serious plotting ;-)' Simpson explained that at first glance the use of smilies may have distracted the overworked officers from the real content of the message.

'It's a real worry,' claimed Simpson 'We can only hope that over time the nation loses it's sense of humour, or the authorities gain one'.

True story : We were visited by CID following a report of food terrorism threats coming from one of our flat-mates (food terrorism - causing terror by threatening to put poison or broken glass in consumer products - was in vogue in the early nineties).

What had happened was we'd been sending increasingly ridiculous letters to the complaints department of Mr Freezy Pops about finding foreign objects in their excellent products, (a Ford Escort manual, a dog, the ghost of Mozart...) thinking that it would brighten up someone's day...

We signed every letter with the name of the one flat-mate who wasn't involved...

...yes we were students, and I know now we really were rather tiresome...

Mr Freezy Pops must have got fed up with us, and reported the incident...

...anyway, the investigating officer took great pleasure in reading out the letters back to us in a monotone, and asking if the claims we made had any truth in them...